Thursday, 27 December 2012

Cambridge University Museum of Zoology

The
mobile digitalization team was in Cambridge on the 14th of November, visiting
the Cambridge Zoological Museum. Only 11 types are held there, but some are
very nice specimens: two of the most complete Lower Carboniferous reptiles and
a Cretaceous turtle, with the skull completely and nicely preserved! Nothing
the size of a dinosaur, but let’s say that we encountered some of its smaller ancestors!

Michela scanning a type in the University Museum of Zoology, Cambridge

Time is always running
fast when you have only a day in Cambridge, but we managed to have a quick look
through the Sedgwick Museum which is always fascinating to see (it was our
lunchtime Mike, don’t worry, we worked as much as we could!), and we met the Cambridge
digitisation team. Like us, Hilary (scanning) and Lindsey (photographing) are digitising
the type collections of the Sedgwick Museum, the they showed us hundreds of
boxes with types: it can seem an easy and quick job, but it is never as you
would expected it! We also exchanged some useful information about common
problems we had and tricks to solve them, I won’t reveal you the latter, you
know we still have to keep a little mystery around the final product you will see on the website!

1 comment:

What an interesting blog, introduced by a thought-provoking photo. The unusual wall painting of the dwellings is also a strangely modern interpretation. Something like this hieroglyphic view of a park by Swiss painter Paul Klee, http://EN.WahooArt.com/A55A04/w.nsf/OPRA/BRUE-8LT475. The image can be seen at wahooart.com who can supply you with a canvas print of it.